Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Welcome to my new blog called The Color Guru. This blog will give you great tips on how to make your home more attractive and current with simple and cost effective solutions. As the owner of Mavin Hill Designs, I have spent the past 15 years learning the tricks of the trade and how to give your home a professional look. Please feel free to contact me any time through my website http://www.mavinhilldesigns.com/.

This week I encountered new clients with a design dilemma that I see all the time. A couple decide to move in together and they both have their own home. The blended home is often the most difficult issue I deal with. How do you take two different households and edit down to the best of both? It is not easy, but it can be done. I tell my clients that I will visit each one of their homes seperately. I ask them to tag only the things they MUST have and then tag those things they they want to get rid of. Once I take inventory of both homes I sit down with the couple in a neutral setting and ask them what they want their house to look like and how it needs to function. You would be suprised how much comes out in this session. It is very hard to part with your things. It is even harder to compromise with someone that may have a totally different view on design.

Once we work on what we are going to keep. I then ask them to bring me pictures of rooms they like. I call it homework. After I have reviewed their ideas and their wish list, I will take them shopping. I say "show me what you love". This is where we usually find a common ground. Even if we don't wind up buying anything, the exercise helps a couple to visualize what the other person's expectations are and how the home will look.

Next, I create a design board where we lay out each person's existing things in each room. Keep in mind a love seat in your current formal living room may be reinvented in the famlily room of the new house with the use of new pillows or a new throw blanket. Keep an open mind. Even I am sometimes suprised how things work out when we work on placement.

Finally, I suggest that before the couple moves in to their new space, that we paint. Nothing makes a space newer than a coat of paint. A new color palate, even in an existing home, can make your old furniture look completely new.
The blended home is a series of trials and errors, but you might just be suprised how much fun the process of reinventing your house can be.